ATX Build Advice

[stayloft12]

I’ve never built an HTPC before but someone I knew built them as a hobby and sold me a bunch of the parts he had really cheap (he got a new job overseas). I have a couple of questions if someone could help me out?

Below is a list of the hardware I have. I know some of this is overkill but it’s what he had and I paid very little for it. I will be using this primarily to watch HD movies and listen to music and want very high quality HD movie playback and music playback. I will do some picture and video editing but nothing huge. Possibly some gaming but not much and not a big priority for me. I will use some of the space as network backup (maybe 1 TB). I would prefer it to be very quiet due to the location it will be in.

He didn’t have a power supply. I was think about getting the Seasonic, SSR-450RM G series 450W. Is this going to be enough power for this build?

What do you think about this HTPC? Any problems with this setup which I should be aware of?

Thanks!

Silverstone GD08
INTEL i5-3570 Quad-Core 3.4 - 3.8GHz TB LGA1155 DDR3-1600
ASUS P8Z77-V LGA 1155 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX
Scythe Big Shuriken Heatpipe Universal Low Profile CPU Cooler
Sapphire Ultimate Radeon HD 6670 (Fanless) PCIe x16, DVI+HDMI+DP
G.SKILL 8GB (2 x 4GB) Ripjaws X Series DDR3 1600MHz
Corsair Force GT 240 GB SATA III SSD
2 of Western Digital Caviar Green 3 TB SATA III 64 / 5400 RPM
ASUS Xonar Essence STX Sound Card
Ceton InfiniTV 4 PCIe - 4-channel Internal Cable TV Tuner Card
ASUS BW-12B1ST/BLK/G/AS 12X Blu-ray Burner
Windows 7 Pro 64-bit

 

[Charlie98]

At first glance that will wind up being a pretty high-dollar HTPC! True, there is a huge amount of overkill... essentially that is a mid-range gamer build, but if you have the parts already... Understand, it's going to suck a little power.

The only conflict I see is the tall heatspreaders on the RAM... they may interfere with the cooler.

Win7 already comes with Windows Media Center, which is very good, at least to start with. You may need additional software to watch BluRay Discs, or if you want to rip DVDs to storage.

That PSU should work very nicely.

 

[stayloft12]

Thanks for the help! I'll check to make sure the cooler/RAM heatspreaders don't conflict.

 

[thestrangebrew1]

That's a nice, powerful build for an htpc. Should work awesome for the extra stuff you plan on doing with the build as well. I'd be carefull with the green drives though. If you're going to use them for storage, have a backup of that as well. I've read that the green drives have problems, so you might want to look into it and always back them up if possible. Like Charlie said, only real issue you might come across are the spreaders on the RAM might be too tall. RAM is fairly cheap though if you have problems.

 

[stayloft12]

I had read some reviews saying the WD green drives were unreliable but also saw a couple saying the new ones are better. Hoping that's true! I will definitely keep a backup though, thanks for the advice!

 

[Charlie98]

I had read some reviews saying the WD green drives were unreliable but also saw a couple saying the new ones are better. Hoping that's true! I will definitely keep a backup though, thanks for the advice!

The resident HTPC expert (Assassin) uses the green drives and says he gets very good service out of them. Personally, I only have one, it's in a constant-write video surveillance box... it's doing well so far. I actually plan to try one of the WD Red drives when I upgrade the HTPC here soon. In any event, if you have any data you don't want to lose, you need a redundant copy of it on another drive.

 

[aarontpx]

Have had a first gen wd green 1tb since january of 2009, not one problem. I for one believe their problems, at least for the 1 and 2 tb models, is WAY overstated. No experience with the 3tb models.